Where thoughts take form.

Archive for October, 2011

I spent yesterday evening with one of my closest friends as he was running home from the hospital to walk his dogs, eat dinner, and buy a onesie for his newborn baby boy. It is as close a friend as him who makes an impact in their life as momentous as one from your own. Walking into the house for the last time baby-free and entering the kitchen where I have been countless times over the years I met the face of a proud, grateful new father.

This isn’t to be sappy though.

Previous to their vacation back at the start of the year when they purposefully conceived, my friend and his wife had been dead set against having any children. Over life and times one of them changed their mind, and began a campaign of persuasion over the other. A couple years and nine months later, a healthy baby boy came to them on a cool day at the beginning of October. My friend said he and his father cried after he was delivered. Tears of happiness. Tears of relief for an infant’s health. Tears of pride for carrying on the family name. Tears of meaning for an upstanding couple who without doubt will now leave their mark on the world.

There was a weight in the air that put static in your arm hair. If marriage is another chapter, this was a new testament. The momentum of change plunged through the airwaves filling the space between us as we talked and moved around the house. My eustress antennae was about to spring from its metaphysical mount in its attempt to draw my full attention to the memories of these moments.

While he was in another room changing out the clothes in their hospital bag from the day before, I stood and simply felt the house. The energy in the air nearly dimmed the lights. I thought about the big picture as well as the details, considered their life and mine and also the one we as friends have together.

Of the countless circumstances that lead us forward each day, there are on occasion these true moments of life that are so exceptional, so exothermic by nature, they simply exist on their own as an independent, unconquerable entity standing alone and supporting itself amidst its own radiant energy.

The momentum could have been from any kind of monumental, life-changing event. I imagine the feeling could have been the same as if I had learned they were moving to another country, or had taken a job as a CEO. They all create a crease in the flat panels of our lives where the now is separated from the before.

One of the most beautiful aspects of my visit was in its purity. Neither one put on airs or pretended to be any more excited than we actually were. We didn’t jump around and make a show. We met, and hugged, and talked, and simply took an active, appreciative seat in this child’s second day of life.

He is a new father. He was not scared, not boggled by worries and complications. He was just, now, Dad.

As much as I would like to benefit from the excitement of a child of myself, I was satisfied to have been there, sharing every ounce of the love that fills my world and the people I have in it.